Long Time Gone

I found a remarkable historical video that shows the construction of the stage that was used at the Woodstock Music Festival in 1969.

What I find most interesting the the way the youth culture aggressively deploys machines to despoil nature and advance their own (peculiar) desires. Take a few minutes and watch it until the end. This short film contains a powerful and rarely expressed narrative.

Watch as the meadow is transformed into an industrial area designed to optimize the performance of music.

About Dr. Bill Thomas, ChangingAging.org

Bill is a visionary leader in the online Changing Aging movement and a world-renowned authority on geriatric medicine and eldercare. Bill is founder of two movements to reshape long-term care globally – The Eden Alternative and Green House Project. He is currently traveling the country influencing culture change with the Age of Disruption Tour.

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Don’t get you point. Building a stage in a pasture is despoiling nature? Are you one of those who thinks that cities despoil nature, or perhaps the evil suburbs make up of ticky tacky houses that all look the same? Woodstock was actually one of the more innocent actions of 60’s youth.

Pogo summed it up nicely, “We have met the enemy and he is us”. Thank you Dr. Bill for sharing a different view of Woodstock from the viewpoint of our world as we understand it and our kids see depicted without nostalgia. I wonder what our great grandchildren will think?

This is perhaps a new thread… but if you’re concerned about ‘large, industrial scale events colliding with most sustainable practices’, forget about the grazing of a few hectares at Woodstock in 1969 and look at what’s happening here and now in our world. Look, for instance, at how a single and sinister American biotechnology company named Monsanto is confidently erasing food security right across the globe. Gene patents is the frightening new economy. Bigger than banks, this economy is promising trillions of dollars.

Monsanto and its subsidiaries are irrevocably set on controlling the world’s food supply… and all with the dollar in mind. They have already destroyed sustainable communities in the developing world [Google Vandana Shiva on the staggering level of Indian farmer suicides], and are now destroying agricultural communities in the developed world.

What does this have to do with ChangingAging.org?

Everything. If you think you’re too old to be bothered, then think about your children and grandchildren.

Monsanto is the company that brought to the world PCB’s – [remember? chemicals used as insulators for more than 50 years in whitegoods across the world until they were banned in the early 80s].

Monsanto created Agent Orange, used by the US army during the Vietnam War. Monsanto knowingly denied the veracity of this herbicide by presenting falsified scientific studies. **Half a million Vietnamese children were born with birth defects, and another half million Vietnamese were killed or maimed solely from exposure to this herbicide.

Who cares?

Monsanto has also made its fortune from DDT, now banned.

Still on the market are Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone [banned in Europe due to its risks to animal and human health], but liberally available elsewhere, and the sweetener Aspartame.

Six weeks ago Monsanto bought [or were they given?] a one-third share in a company that plant breeds and produces the majority of Australian wheat. The other two company shareholders are the Western Australian state government and the Australian federal government. This story is the same in territories across the world.

But as Saint Mary of the Cross McKillop said, “Never see a need without ever doing anything about it”.

Re archival footage of the Aquarius Festival, search YouTube. Below are some short grabs of footage. You have to consider that in 1973, the only technology available was 8mm film. [Of course, 16mm was available to heightened professionals.] I certainly didn’t have an 8mm camera at hand, but did take photos of our journey across Australia. Once there, I was swallowed up by the place. The camera was discarded. It’s that kind of place.

So interested to read about your experience. Do you have any photos or journal entries from that period. I would love to see them. The “Boomers” are a massive generation and it is not possible to say anything about “them” as a whole.

What interests me is the stark contrast between the bucolic setting that the necessary bulldozer and heavy earthwork as well as the chain link fence.

It is a reminder that large, industrial scale, events collide with most sustainable practices.

Your event seems much more person-centered.

Finally, I would love to know where the people shown in the film are now.

How have they changed? What would they say about these images if they watched them now?

Can you, Dr Bill, unpack your view of the ‘many layers of meaning folded into this video’ and how it relates to your concerns about aging?

In 1973 as a 19-year-old I crossed the country from west to east [4000 miles] with a bunch of young architects + artists to attend the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin [Australia’s equivalent of Woodstock]. We’d all pitched in to buy a retired bus and travel the distance. The old red bus broke down a few times across the Nullabor and on other isolated roads. But we made it. We arrived a week before the festival began and worked diligently to build bridges across rivers, geodesic domes in the designs of Buckminster Fuller, and generally make the whole area community fluid. We never used machinery. Every single bridge and building was hand constructed, and always with great care and reverence to the profoundly majestic landscape in this very, very special place.

I guess my point is that not all ‘boomers’ were disrespectful of nature at that time, the world over. Like Woodstock, the Aquarius Festival at Nimbin was hugely about music. But unlike Woodstock, it stretched the performative paradigm to embrace many different kinds of music and theatrical performance. Significantly, from the beginning, it tilted towards sustainability. In my view, a big slab of the sustainability movement in Australia seeded at Nimbin’s Aquarius Festival. And it is those flighty souls who are now caring for their elders… Oh la.